From 1976 to 1989, I lived in a flat on Frith Street in Soho, above Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. I went to sleep every night listening to jazz, which is alright if you like jazz, and I did. Ronnie was from east London, like me, and there were a lot of East End boys running the club. So I’d go down for a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and have a rabbit – it was like being at home.

Chet Baker came in one night in 1986, and I asked him if I could do a couple of shots before he went on. I said: “I’ve got to tell you, when I was 13, I bought the Chet Baker Quartet record with Winter Wonderland on it. Russ Freeman was the pianist … ” And Chet said, “Yeah, he was, in 1953.” He just stopped and stared, going back through his memory. And that’s when I took the picture. Then he went downstairs and did his set. He played beautifully, considering he’d lost a lot of his teeth in the gutter – the emotion and passion still came through.

It’s a haunting image, but people adore it, because that life comes through. That Soho is dying out now, turning into Disneyland. When you have corporate greed come in, everything becomes the same, and I find that very boring. I don’t want the same coffee around the world.

I left school when I was 15, went up West Ham labour exchange, and said “I’m going to be a photographer.” There was a job going at the McCann Erickson advertising agency. The bloke said I wouldn’t get it – they wanted people from university, with qualifications. There were blokes waiting in reception a lot older than me, in tweed with patches on their elbows. They totally blanked me.

It turned out these lads did have qualifications, but no pictures. I had pictures. I ended up there for a couple of years, and got my first one-man exhibition aged 17; I opened my own studio at 19. If you don’t have very much money, you make another way of looking at life. The East End had a new kind of beauty – a beautiful violence. Your eyes were being opened all the time. I could have got in trouble in the early days and I did walk away from some of it, because if I got banged up I couldn’t take pictures.

I was racing motorbikes, boxing; I was into a lot of things. But photography was saying to me: this is what you do. I’d be going off to Rome for Nova magazine, spending the week with John Huston talking about film noir and the Maltese Falcon, and then back to the East End – it was one extreme to another.

I do what I feel. I had a show a few years back, and I turned up in a leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans. A posh lady in her 50s was looking at a photograph I’d taken of grain silos in Utah. I said, “Why do you think he shot it like that?” And for the next 15 minutes she explained it to me. It was very complimentary, but complete bollocks.

Everyone sees different things – Tarkovsky once said if you have one book and a thousand people read it, you have a thousand books. I can’t intellectualise why I take pictures. I’m still trying to get it right, but if I knew what “right” was, I’d stop.